CAD/CAM Milling Machines

David,

The one thing going for CAD designers with good bench skills is they
can get paid a substantial premium over just the bench job because
of the CAD. In the NW bench folks are very, very lucky if they break
$20/hr, whereas CAD designers can bring in more than twice that.

Regards,
James McMurray
@James_McMurray

Ed,

could you please e-mail me which machines you are referring to? I
spent 5 days in Tucson and looked at $4500-32,000 machines. The Rio
one looks good as does the software. Is this the one you are
talking about?

Thanks for your thoughts in advance.

Michael
Kelseys@paulbunyan.net
http://www.kelseysasyoulikeit.com

Ed,

Yes this is a substantial savings up front but you will be hating
life if you can’t use the program and it won’t matter what you spent,
it will still be wasted. I personely do not like anything about
cimigraphy. i know people that have purchased it and two years later
could still not make what they wanted. And no this was not an
ignorant person, this was a very talented jeweler in Texas.

It would do someone very well to have an understanding of not only
how these programs build but how you as an individual learn… I am
very analetical (sp) I like things to build in steps. I like things
to be logical to the way that I work at the bench. Many of the
programs are just not that way. Most programs do one or two things
extremely well a few will do more but Matrix is the only one that I
have found that pushes the envelope all the time. If another program
does something better, Gem Vision will take the chalenge and meet the
bar and then set it higher. I know I’m using the one program that
does almost everything well for me, not just one or two things. I
also build mostley rings, and I can build them much faster in matrix
than in programs where you have to build it flat and then tell the
program to make it round. Matrix is very logical to me and the way
my brain wraps itself around building, so I don’t mind that it costs
a little more because I can use it well and it makes money for me,
and after all isn’t that the whole point.

Dave Delaria

Britten,

On average I can say that it takes me anywhere from 10min. to 2
hours depending on the difficulty of the model. Milling then takes
anywhere from 30 min to 3 hours again depending on the model. Once
my mill is running I go on and do other jobs. I can make models this
way that could only be duplicated by hand fabricating. I once milled
4 jobs in one day. If I had to carve those models that’s all I would
have accomplished that day, and I’m a good wax carver. Besides after
22 years, my elbows and neck really like the mill.

Dave Delaria

To all,

Digital goldsmiths really does have a place that is very valuable,
and you are right when you say that it is not a good jewelry
designer. I never use it a a true design program its really not
meant to be that. I have many customers who just cannot visualize
anything. For them I can pull a stuller ring out of the library or
import a picture of their own ring and make quick color changes or
stone changes so that they can have a visual right then of how
something is going to look. I use it in conjuction with GemVisions
system 6 camera to show people whats wrong with their jewelry. I
take pictures of womens diamonds to ensure trust that we are not
switching their stone. DG4 has many great practical applications
that are quick and easy with a very low learning curve. But like
everythibng it is just a tool, and if you do not have an application
for it then it might be of no use to you.

As for Mills and Cad, all mills mill, and all cad programs are
difficult. You just don’t start using these things one day and your
life is peachy keen. It takes the same dedication that being a good
goldsmith takes. And yes, if you don’t have some basic knowledge of
jewelry enginering you will probably end up in some trouble some
times. Everyone seems to want to get in but complain about the price
Gem Vision charges. All mills are not equal andall companies are not
equal. I have looked at just about everyone of them. I know many
people using everyone of the mills mentioned here and I can say that
after hereing all of there complaints, I’m very glad that I bought
the Revo. could I have purchased a cheaper mill? Of course, but I
like the quick service that GV gives, I like that there is someone
to help me through My own messes and difficult models. I like that
the Revo was all inclusive and very easy to learn and use, I never
went to training and had 5 models milled in the first 3 day’s. No
matter what a company tells you, they absolutley do what they do best
when they demo their product for you. This does not mean that you
will be able to think or build the same way. I need to quit befor
someone gets mad at me. …These things are not purchases to
be taken lightly, there is a lot of competition and mis
so do your due diligence and talk to everyone and ask a lot of
questions untill you find your comfort zone.

respectivly,
Dave Delaria

    So many  students "design" items that never fly due to
structural problems and NO I repeat NO bench time. 

Hi Britten;

It’s not just the students. I worked in a retail store and they
bought this piece from a pricey manufacturer, done in platinum, very
heavy, set with plenty of 1/4 carat VS diamonds. Well, I could
recognize it as a CAD piece. Problem was, they had hinges under the
diamonds that when they moved, pushed these big stones right out.
The piece kept coming back missing stones. Few hundred dollars out of
pocket each time. I think there are plenty of people working in CAD
making jewelry who probably went to school and learned how to make
can-openers, cool-looking cigarette lighters, whatever, so they
figured why shouldn’t I do jewelry too? They got the job.

But then, I see an awful lot of jewelry not done in CAD that when I
get it to fix, I can’t shut up about how bad it is. I always try to
guess, “which is it: they didn’t know any better or they didn’t
care?”.

David L. Huffman

    The one thing going for CAD designers with good bench skills
is they can get paid a substantial premium over just the bench job
because of the CAD. In the NW bench folks are very, very lucky if
they break $20/hr, whereas  CAD designers can bring in more than
twice that. 

Hi James;

Well, I don’t understand what’s the problem in the NW. Maybe the
jewelers are getting that “you shouldn’t expect so much money
because people want to live here for the quality of life. . .” Bull
S**t. A top shelf bench guy can get $60,000 a year in a lot of areas
just for a starting wage. Here in central NY, where the economy is
really limping, there are 50K jobs if you are a wizard, and I’ve
heard of jewelers in places like Scottsdale AZ getting 80 grand. $20
an hour was a decent wage to start when I was back in Michigan back
in the early 90’s. Why not? I’m pretty sure I could bring in a
margin of $120,000 a year on my labor in a retail situation if they
had the customer base. I’m getting close to my goal of wholesaling
my labor at around $100,000 a year now, after a couple years of
stuggle.

But finally, I can’t see there being a lot of jobs, at least in
retail, where a jeweler would have that much bargaining power just
because they could run CAD. They’d have to have the rest of the skill
set and do it pretty good. The retailers aren’t convinced that CAD
would add that much to their income, and from what I know about
retail, I think they’re right. CAD skills are great, but they aren’t
essential. The average retailer is lucky if they can afford a good
torch jockey/prong bender. If they are a high end store, they want
wax carving, casting and setting skills and ability to fabricate,
especially in 18K and Platinum, and they’re darned lucky these days
if they can find someone. My opinion, if it came to a choice between
someone with CAD experience and someone with good people/sales skills
and both of them had the requisite skill set of a good custom
jeweler, anybody would be a fool not to pick the latter for a retail
situation. Start training them in CAD afterwards, and after you buy
your laser.

David L. Huffman

I've worked for plenty of these "designers".  Now I charge an
upfront fee just to talk to them because they've wasted so much of
my time.

Over the years I have relied on the skills of many different people
to help bring my work to market. Since I often rely on others it is
fortunate that each human is endowed with a certain capacity for
excellence. Since I can not excel in all fields I make an effort to
see excellence in those around me. Many of the best song writers
can not sing, many counter hack designers, can not set stones and
most computer geeks don’t know how to make anything. Only by
working together with others, can we utilize our combined strengths.

There is a certain conservatism present in all established
industries including ours. Although institutional training, such as
apprenticeship goldsmithing or taking conservatory at Julliard,
might lead to a certain level of technical excellence, I am more
inspired by those who’s ideas are fresh and new. In our industry
Kate Wolf, with her gold and silver colored modeling wax comes to
mind. As does Sam Phillips who founded Sun records in 1952. Many
of us who are really endowed with artistic talent, can not by our
nature submit to years of ridged institutional training. Neither
Johnny Cash, nor Elvis Presley (sun records) would have been
accepted to the Julliard, yet their accomplishments sing for
themselves.

We live in a time when many people think art is the act hanging
miles of shinny cloth on buildings. For me that is showmanship, not
art. For me art is where you find it, and in the eyes of those who
dare to dream.

So send me those dreamers, they may not have a clue how to make
anything, but with vision and help they might just surprise us.

        So many  students "design" items that never fly due to
structural problems and NO I repeat NO bench time. 

This isn’t a problem that’s limited to the use of CAD/CAM.

I started in an Art Metals class offered through a local state
university and it was heavy on design and extremely light on time
with the tools. Since this was a first metals class, I really
expected it to be the other way around.

How can you make jewelry without learning how to use the tools, and
use them WELL even if later (for design/artistic considerations) you
choose to go with a rougher or more primitive look? That should be
a CHOICE and not because you can’t do any better…

The attitude seemed to be that actual fabrication was unimportant.
I’m still shaking my head over that.

Sojourner

Hi Kevin I didnt want to offend any one, I am not afraid of
technology I just think that people should be told the truth before
they go out and spend 10000 bucks on somthing that may never pay for
itself I have an entire machine shop. I have all full size machines
such as a Bridgeport verticle mill a kearney and trekor unversal
horizontal a gorton 3d pantomill and tons of other related
machinerey. I got this stuff from machine shops going bankrupt after
they purchased the latest and greatest they would finance these new
cnc machines and than have to keep them running twenty four seven
just to make the payments to the bank. The competition for work
becomes so fierce that it is a race for the bottom in Tucson I can
get cnc work done at a shop for as little as thirty dollars an hour
and they are using 100000 dollar machines at that rate you could
barely make the payment to the bank and feed yourself. If you are
going to buy one of these you need to have lots of work for it and
it needs to be work that you could not carve by hand faster or this
thing will never pay for itself. just my humble opinion

ps if you charge one hundred dollars to hand carve a wax. you would
need to carve two hundred waxes with this machine to pay for it and
pay yourself. I carve about three to four waxes per week it would
take me several years to pay for this machine it will be obsolete in
two or three and not worth 20 percent of what you paid for it.

Kevin Potter

    So send me those dreamers, they may not have a clue how to
make anything, but with vision and help they might just surprise
us. 

Hello Martin;

First, let me say, in jest of course, be careful what you wish for.
But really, I see your point. I understand the value of a fresh
perspective. That’s not where my problem is. It’s with those whose
perspective isn’t really fresh, just a re-hash of everybody else’s
contributions. I say that these people have forgotten whose pockets
they have picked. And those aren’t the worst. Far more problematic
are those individuals who can’t seem to defer to anybody else’s
expertise if they themselves don’t have same. That’s the only way I
can describe it, awkward as that phrase seems. They are unable to
trust, so they think that you have ulterior motives when you try to
point out that something can’t or shouldn’t be done the way they
think it should. And by the way, that upfront fee I spoke of is a
deposit, applied to any future services. I don’t mean to discourage
anyone from their creative urges. Here’s a parallel I hope
describes my situation: I can be the equivalent of a voice coach, but
I am not the venture capitalist who is going to finance their singing
career.

David L. Huffman

   Well, I don't understand what's the problem in the NW.  Maybe
the jewelers are getting that "you shouldn't expect so much money
because people want to live here for the quality of life. . . 

I think it may be more a factor of the abundance of slightly less
skilled, but very cheap labor, in the form of immigrants from Asia
in the pacific Northwest, who’re pretty sure they know how to light a
torch, probably can size a ring or two here and there, won’t melt
too many chains, but couldn’t actually build a nice platinum ring if
their lives depended on it. A smaller percentage of them are actually
pretty skilled. These guys will work cheap, and many stores that
would benefit from more highly skilled labor, don’t want to pay for
it. Here in Seattle, you simply don’t find jobs offering much more
than 20 to 25 an hour, even in the high end retail stores, and
despite Seattle’s rather high cost of living… Pretty sad, if you ask
me, especially since it puts me in that boat. Rather disheartening to
know that if I had a family of four, including myself, to support on
what I make, instead of just a couple of cats, I’d actually be
uncomfortably close to earning less than the federal poverty level
income. Yeah, that’s why I went to school all those years. For sure.
anyone know other options here in the Seattle area, please let me
know…

Peter

       So many  students "design" items that never fly due to

structural problems and NO I repeat NO bench time.

   Well, I could recognize it as a CAD piece. Problem was, they had
hinges under the diamonds that when they moved, pushed these big
stones right out. I think there are plenty of people working in CAD
making jewelry who probably went to school and learned how to make
can-openers, cool-looking cigarette lighters, whatever, so they
figured why shouldn't I do jewelry too?  They got the job. 

The main problem I come across when I have to “CAD” a model for
someone other than myself, is that they have no idea of scale or any
care other then the image that they have in their heads of a nice
looking well proportioned piece. When actuality drawn out to
customers specifications it is a total hunk of $#(* ! Often times I
am forced to have an actual debate with designers about such
problems usually ending up with me handing them a pen, piece of
paper, and a millimeter gauge “you draw it and show me.”

Remember when someone like a retailer sends a product or design to a
pricey manufacture or anyone else, like me, I only make it the way
I’m told. Its not that I don’t know any better and its not that I
don’t care, Its just design flaw and a lack of understanding plain
and simple. On occasion they will not compromise or listen to reason
so they get exactly what they asked for… a total hunk of $#(*

With out understanding how things are set, why they are set a
cretin way, and everything else that goes along with that it is
very hard to just use CAD I would think. 

Wow - that typo is right up there with the “demantiod darnets”!
I’m sure that many jewelers who have to deal with poorly engineered
designs have dealt with their share of cretins…

Thanks for the chuckle :slight_smile:

Jessee Smith
www.silverspotstudio.com
Cincinnati, Ohio

if you charge one hundred dollars to hand carve a wax. you would
need to carve two hundred waxes with this machine to pay for it
and pay yourself. I carve about three to four waxes per week it
would take me several years to pay for this machine it will be
obsolete in two or three and not worth 20 percent of what you paid
for it. 

So far, that has not been my experience. I hand carve some things,
machine others. Sometimes I hire out the carving- figure work has
never been easy for me. Buying my CNC machine 6 years ago was a leap
of faith, but it has paid its way and more- can anyone carve by hand
any one of hundreds of font styles in minutes? ArtCAM has added to my
range of choices, the learning curve is reasonable, and it has
continued to develop new tools and functionality.

Rick Hamilton

Wise Blood’s post on this subject reminded me, as so many of these
posts do, of another old adventure. He wrote of receiving orders
for bad designs and, being unable to talk the designer into a
rethink - finally just giving the customer what they want - a
piece of #$%$!!!

Well, at least he had the opportunity and the good sense to confront
the designer, and he gives it a try, so I suppose that is fair
enough. Why should bull-headedness be rewarded with success?

When work is contracted out, somewhere along the line, before
materials and time are committed to the project, somebody HAS to see
the finished project as a WHOLE, preferably in a prototype, a scale
model, or even a really good drawing.

Forgive me if I ramble on with one of my stories, not from the
jewelry field, but on point anyway. I can’t help it if I haven’t
always been a metalworker.

About 30 years ago I was running my woodwork shop in the interior of
British Columbia. I took on a “rush” job to build window frames for
a custom log house which was being built about an hour’s drive north
of my shop. The sashes (the part of the window which actually holds
the glass and is mounted in the frame) had been contracted out to a
shop in Vancouver and would be arriving later. The designer/builder
gave me a set of specs which was simply some pages showing
dimensioned drawings of a bunch of rectangles. Each of these
described the size of a rough opening in the walls where a window was
to fit. Each opening was numbered. My job was to build the frames to
fit each opening and deliver them to the building site where the
sashes would be waiting. There I would install the frames in the
openings, the sashes in the frames and, voila! the house would be
warm and cozy against the approaching winter.

I built the frames as specified and delivered them on site. It was
the first time I’d seen the house. The designer/builder was justly
proud. It was a masterpiece of the log-builder’s art. The logs were
massive, beautifully fit together, cleanly finished and varnished.
There were huge exposed trusses with excellent joinery. All in all,
the massive scale and solidity of the house was perfectly suited to
the owners.

Himself was a newly-retired Canadian Army tank commander, a colonel
if I recall, and his wife was a veddy British lady. She had lots of
fine antique furniture and porcelain tea services, all carefully
piled under tarps in the damp, dark, concrete basement. There, in one
corner, the colonel and his lady were gamely camped out while the
building rose above them. The site was fairly remote, built in the
woods off a steep old logging road. It was already October and the
nights were frosty. “Worse things have happened at sea!” the colonel
said, shrugging off the hardships. I was to hear that expression
again in the following days. As when, for example, it turned out
that the sashes did not arrive from Vancouver on time. (“Worse things
have happened at sea!”). I set to work installing the frames. Each
one was carried to the appropriately numbered opening and each one
fit into its place like a dream.

Eventually the sashes did arrive, some weeks late. Now it was
November, and an early winter was setting in. I was called to come
quickly and mount the sashes to their frames. The road up to the
house site was starting to ice up. The colonel and his lady, still
camping in the dark, fortress-like foundation were beginning to look
a bit stressed.

I confronted the pile of sashes, about 40 or so, all neatly
numbered, and I started to distribute them to their appropriate
windows. Things started to look a bit odd. For example, the sash for
a window on the north wall of a room might have, say, six large
panes ( 2 across and 3 high) while an identical sized window on the
west wall of the same room might have a sash with 12 much smaller
panes (3 across and 4 high). Very odd indeed. At first I thought
maybe the sashes had been mis-numbered and we started re-shuffling
the deck, so to speak, trying to make sense of the muddle. That
didn’t work at all. I called the window shop in Vancouver and the
foreman insisted he had built all the sashes as ordered. This was
before faxes, emails, cell phones. Communications generally were
not as they are today - but I finally got a copy of the order he
worked from - which was a set of four drawings, each showing an
elevation of the house; east, west, north, and south. Each window
showed little criss-cross lines roughly sketched in, indicating
window panes in the windows, almost as a child might have drawn
them. No further specs. The foreman had built the sashes exactly as
they were sketched. I had enough sense not to ask, at that late
date, who had drawn those sketches, the designer or the owners. The
shop foreman was, in his own mind, blameless, pure as the driven
snow - which was now starting to fall with some regularity.

The colonel said, “Worse things have happened at sea!” It was too
late to change the sashes. They’d have to go into the frames as they
were. There were puddles of frozen water all over the "bedroom"
floor, despite the endlessly roaring oil space heater which filled
the house with diesel fumes. The old tank commander might have felt
right at home in that atmosphere but his lady’s stiff upper lip was
starting to quiver. It was bitterly cold indoors or out.

The windows were casements, which means that the sashes are meant to
open by swinging outwards. Now we discovered another design element
which had not been anticipated by the builder. He had wisely
designed a very steep roof to shed the abundant snows of our region.
Consequently, the eaves overhung the side walls in such a manner
that the windows on those walls could not swing out without striking
the underside of the overhang. Whoops! Well, there were always the
end walls - but no! The builder had displayed his excellent joinery
by including huge exposed log trusses under the gable ends of the
roof. The horizontal members of these trusses passed directly in
front of the windows on the end walls so they could not open any
better than the windows on the side walls.

The colonel and his lady must have had words with each other and
with their designer/builder but all I ever heard was the usual
"Worse things have happened at sea."

Perhaps with better justification than the sash shop foreman, I
felt that I had done my job properly, and I collected my fee in good
conscience. I had a family to support. Nevertheless I felt very
badly for those two half-frozen backwoods pioneers when I left them
in their dream house full of mis-matched windows that wouldn’t open.
There was a bit of “good news” to the story. Their lonely location
insured that not many people (other than themselves) would actually
see the silly-looking windows. And the weather insured that it
would be many months before they would ever want to open any of the
windows.

Again, I extend my apologies for straying so far afield but I think
I have learned from that experience to ask an awful lot of questions
when somebody asks me to build something out of context. What is it
for? Who is it for? What does it have to fit next to? What do you
want it to do? How do you want it to work ? I don’t ever want to
take money again for a bad job, no matter who is to blame.

And I do have the colonel’s words to cheer me when things go wrong.
“Worse things have happened at sea.” Like the Titanic.

Marty in Victoria, where the weather is better than I really ought
to tell folks about.

Marty, that was a GREAT story, illustrating WHY a person who is not a
jewelry designer will not become one just by buying computer software.

David Barzilay
Lord of the Rings
607 S Hill St Ste 850
Los Angeles, CA 90014-1718
213-488-9157

In writing my overly long and digressive post yesterday - the one
about the log house whose windows didn’t match - (What’s that got
to do with ganoksin?) - I did increase my understanding of how the
various problems came to be.

Why didn’t the windows on each side of the house match? Because
all those drawings were on separate sheets of paper, not adjacent
on one sheet where the mismatch would be obvious.

Why were the windows unable to open? The roof structure and the
walls were likewise almost certainly on separate sheets - each
sheet perfectly rational on its own, but not shown was how it
related to other parts of the plan. You could draw a fine plan of
a wall but without drawing in the roof on the same drawing you’d
never see how its structure interfered with the windows.

So the writing-out of the whole adventure gave me a little boost in
understanding of a particular sort of design screw-up and how it
came to be built into the house before anyone saw it coming.

Oh yeah, also the foreman at the sash shop was an eejit whose brain
was AWOL and I hope he never got paid.

So what I said at the beginning of that post , sort of intuitively,
needs to be made explicit. Draw or build a plan/model with all the
parts in place, showing how they relate. Separate drawings of all
the parts just won’t do.

Thanks for letting me rattle on.
Marty in Victoria - another sunny day, oh sigh!

    ps if you charge one hundred dollars to hand carve a wax. you
would need to carve two hundred waxes with this machine to pay for
it and pay yourself. I carve about three to four waxes per week it
would take me several years to pay for this machine it will be
obsolete in two or three and not worth 20 percent of what you paid
for it. 

In my SQHO, anyone that buys one of the newer modeling machines at a
rate of 30-100 thousand dollars needs to be sure to keep that
machine running 24/7. I, personally, send the data out to someone
that does this. Last year these people were running their machines
just during working hours, but today, you can bet they are running
for hours and hours after closing.

I have a friend that purchased 3 machining centers at about $250,000
each a few years ago to create gears for gear pumps and found that
he couldn’t find the engineers that could keep them running. A
little glitch in a program could cause a ten thousand dollar crash.
He now has the gears produced in India using old technology with
three workers per mill.

Bruce D. Holmgrain
http://www.goldwerx.com
@Red_Rodder
JA Certified Master Bench Jeweler / CAD/CAM Solutions